QI

Sandi and Alan are joined by Holly Walsh, Stephen K Amos and Ivo Graham as they take part in a silly season edition.

Topics

- Sandi starts by asking questions taken from the QI database, "Blue Whale", putting them into an AI program, and the program was asked to come up with new questions in the same style. They include: "What happens if a flamingo is your wife?", "What is the best way to get a radiant complexion of trousering?", repeatedly asking: "How many legs does the Queen have?" and then suddenly announcing: "I'm naked." It also answered one of their own questions: "How did the Romans? Nobody knows."

- Tangent: American research scientist Janelle Shane programmed a similar neural network to read existing slogans on Love Hearts sweets, and the program suggested new slogans: "Loving horn", "Buns, buns, buns" and "All hail the chicken". The reason for doing this is to point of the limitations of AI. One is "catastrophic forgetting", forgetting old information as new data is fed in. Another is "giraffing", when the program constantly identifies something as something else, e.g. identifies something as a giraffe when it isn't, because AIs are trained online and people tend to post unusual things. People are more likely to post something unusual like a giraffe than something boring like a featureless rock, so the AI thinks giraffes are much more common.

- Tangent: Sandi says she supports fox hunt in the country, but suggests it would be good in London to see traditional red-coat wearing hunters riding around hunting urban foxes. Stephen says the problem is that London foxes have an attitude. He once came back home from a gig at midnight, and found a fox in his driveway, which stared at him aggressively. Sandi has a fox that sits at the back door, as if to say to the do: "Eh..." Alan has a similar thing with his dog (half spaniel, half husky) and an aggressive fox.

- Tangent: AI camera are trained to follow the ball in some football matches. However, at one match at Inverness Caledonian Thistle, the camera instead followed a linesman's bald head.

- A more sensible question from a human creator: What use is a penguin erector at cucumber time? In 2018, a Scottish newspaper reported that Edinburgh Zoo denied employing a penguin erector, following a rumour that it had hired staff to pick up penguins who had fallen over after looking up at aeroplanes. The idea that penguins fall over when they watch penguins fly over head is an urban myth (mentioned in Series B). This story is an example of a "silly season" newspaper stores, normally occurring in late summer, which in many other countries including the Netherlands, Poland and Germany, is known as "cucumber time", but no-one knows for sure why. The silly season came out as an ideas in 1861, and was also known as "giant gooseberry season" because there were stories of people growing giant gooseberries or other fruits. Other stories included sightings of sea, serpents, mermaids, and rain of frogs. The following are all silly season news stories:

- "World Oinksclusive: the Mail saves the bacon of the Tamworth Two": In 1988, two pigs, dubbed Butch and Sundance, escaped from an abattoir in Whitshire, swam a river and went on the run for a week. 100 journalists tracked the pigs across the country. The papers printed full-page maps of the route the pigs, an eventually the Daily Mail bought the pigs to save them.

- "Victor Meldrew Found in Space": In 2005, The Sun reported that a constellation that looked like Richard Wilson could be seen by anyone with a keen eye. It was actually just publicity for Summer Nights of Gold on the Gold channel.

- "Sandi Toksvig's face found on Meghan Markle's knee": This was a full-page story in the Sunday Sport, of a photo of Meghan's knee which the paper claimed looked like Sandi.

- "Drop the Red Donkey": In 2010, The Sun angrily reported about a donkey being made to parasail by its Russian owner. The paper bought the donkey to save it, but they were tricked by the own and bought the wrong one.

- "Traffic Warden Oversteps the Yellow Line": In August 2001, a man called Philip Peters had returned to his parked car, which he had parked in a perfectly legal place, but while he had been gone, contractors in West London had winched his Peugeot off the ground, painted two yellow lines underneath it, put the car back down again, and Peters got a ticket as the car was now in a illegal spot.

- Tangent: Alan did an episode of Jonathan Creek in which Jonathan tried to get a wheel clamp off his car. The prop department had put a couple of fake yellow lines down on the ground, but a traffic warden came along and gave them a ticket. Holly once parked a car where they painted the lines underneath the car, for which she got a ticket, even though she pulled out, took a photo of the car, took a photo of the gap where the wheels were, and she had to spend about four months proving her innocence in small claims courts. She won, but it was stressful. Ivo is taken aback by all this, saying he didn't know he was meant to bring his own story, so he jokes he once swam with two escaped pigs. Sandi says she can't imagine pigs swimming, but Holly says they do swim in Swiss Family Robinson, a book Ivo admits he has never heard off.

- XL Tangent: In British tabloid slang, an FMD is a story that makes you exclaim with shock. The idea comes from a middle-aged man supposedly reading the paper in bed next to their wife and exclaiming: "Fuck me, Doris, have you seen this?"

- The pointless C can be found off the coast of Cornwall is the silent "c" in the "Scilly Isles". They were originally called the "Silly Isles", and the word "Silly" originally meant "happy and blessed". The "c" was added around the 1570s because the word had come to mean what it does today and they did not want to be mocked. The locals, known as Scillonians, refer to the islands as the "Isles of Scilly" or just "Scilly", not "Scilly Isles".

- XL Tangent: Sandi says the best pub she has ever been to is the Turks Head on St. Mary's.

- XL Tangent: According to legend, King Arthur fought his last battle and was buried between Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, in the mythical Kingdom of Lyonesee. The story says there used to be land connecting the two which was then swallowed by the sea in a single night about 1,000 years ago. Some people claim you can hear the bells of Lyonesse's 140 submerged churches ringing underwater. However, in reality water has separated Cornwall from Scilly for longer than Britain has been separated from France, which used to be connected by Doggerland until the seventh millennium BC.

- Tangent: One thing you can find in the waters around Scilly is the salp. They are hollow, jellyfish-like animals that are barrel-shaped, transparent, and part of the sea squirt group of animals. One is around the size of the palm of your hand. They are akin to tubes with an opening at either end and they move by jet propulsion. When they swim together, it is a bit like synchronised swimming, as each member of the chain continues to function as a separate individual, but they swim with their own rhythm, in a really steady pace. Salps are more closely related to humans than other jellyfish, and like humans the salp have spinal cords, but only the young ones. They reproduce in alternating generation of clones and individuals: a solitary mother gives birth asexually to thousands of young clones, all female, which form chains, and these chains are then fertilised en masse by swimming up to the surface through clouds of sperm, deposited by chains of men. Salp also help with carbon capture, because their faecal pellets are very large and heavy, which sink into the seabed, as do dead salps, taking thousands of tonnes of carbon with them.

- Tangent: Alan recalls a nature documentary where fish gather and then the sperm is awash in the sea, and all the fish fertilise, and then giant stingray-like fish come to eat the sperm. It only happens once a year, at a particularly high tide, when the moon is in the right place.

- The panel are asked to rank the words "shart", "subvick", "sectori", "suppect" and "skunkoople" in order of silliness. The correct order is "skunkoople", "subvick" (both silly), "sectori", "suppect" (both not silly) and "shart" (status undetermined). Researchers at the University of Alberta in 2015 tried to establish whether you could objectively measure the silliness of words. Participants were shown various computer-generated nonsense words and asked to rate how humorous they were. The results were all consistent, with made-up words tending to be funnier if the combination of letters is more unusual. Once this was discovered, researchers were able to predict whether test subjects would find a word funny with an accuracy of about 92%. Other made-up words that formed the study also considered silly were "quingle", "probble", "finglam" and "wook". "Sectori" and "suppect" were not silly as they were too similar to actual word forms.

- Tangent: Holly believes "shart" means when you think you are going to fart but you actually "release faecal pellets". Sandi says she could not do that because she never farts. Holly claims to have only farted three times in front of her husband; the first was when she was very ill, the second she tripped on the stairs and farted out of shock, and the third when he was telling Holly off in the car and the timing was too perfect.

- Tangent: Stepehn originally wondered if the words were Scandinavian, but Sandi says their words are more sensible.

- XL Tangent: Ivo challenges this by saying that everything in IKEA has strange names. Sandi has a theory about IKEA, which is at night they write out price tags, then thrown them in the air in the dark, so you might get tealights for £500 or a sofa for 50p. Alan likes to go to the staff and just make up names of products to see how they react.

- XL Tangent: If you need to convince somebody that you are not a robot, the best word to use is "poop", according to a study by cognitive scientists at MIT in 2018 to find the most human word.

XL- The best way to make sure nobody takes you seriously online is to put out a smiley face. "Poe's Law" is an internet truism which states that no matter how ludicrous a statement you make online is, someone will believe it to be true, unless it contains a smiley face. The most famous example of this was the Twitter joke trial, where one Paul Chambers wrote: "Oh, crap, Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky-high." He was charged with sending a menacing message and ended up losing his job.[/coloue]

- [colour=#000080]XL Tangent: During lockdown, Stephen ordered a bicycle and as a joke tweeted: "New bike has arrive, the seat is so high. However, my testes get a good workout." Someone did not know this was a joke and replied that he should get an inflatable seat on eBay to help him.

- XL Tangent: Sandi is not on social media, but Alan tells her she is missing nothing. Alan went back on Twitter after a few years off it to promote a book he had written, and while he had a lot of nice comments, if says if you dare to venture an opinion on anything someone will be after you.

- Tangent: Other laws akin to Poe's Law include "Parkinson's Law", where work expands to fill the time available for its completion; "Sod's Law", the worst possible outcome always happens; "Murphy's Law", anything that can go wrong, will go wrong; "Muphry's Law", where if you write something which points out a spelling or a grammatical error in someone else's work, there will be a similar errar in what you've written yourself. ^_^ There was also the possibly apocryphal story of the "Cobra Effect", where the consequences of an attempt to solve a problem actually make the original problem worse. The original story is that in 19th century Delhi, a scheme to get of cobras was set up by putting a bounty on them, so in order to claim the bounty people started to breed cobras. Thus the scheme got cancelled, people released all their cobras into the wild, and there were actually even more cobras than before the scheme. There is also the "Barbra Streisand Effect", occurred when an aerial photo of her house appeared online which she wanted removed. She launched a $50 million lawsuit against a man who took the photo, a retired software engineer who took the photo to document coastal erosion, but she did not want people to know it was her house. However, before the lawsuit, nobody know it was Streisand's house, and the photo had only been downloaded six times, twice by her lawyers, but then after this thousands of people downloaded the photo. QI show the photo, but pixilate the house out.

- XL Tangent: Holly claims to have her own "Walsh's Law", the smaller the hand the creepier it is, as she thinks her own small hands are creepy. Alan mentions the American comedian Dom Irrera did a routine about watching porn with his wife, and his wife suddenly said: "Now, that's a cock", to which he replied: "They've all got tiny hands, and they sew their mouths together." Ivo proposes "Graham's Law", no showers ten minutes before leaving the house, because it makes you late, you have to run for the train, and you are sweatier than you were before. Stephen mentions "Stefan's Law", which in physics is a law that measures heat coming off a black body. Holly points out that the oxygen readers that clip onto people's fingers inaccurately read the results of black people, because they work with light penetrating skin. Stephen also proposes "Amos's Law", to ban your elderly parents staying with you for more than three weeks. This is because his 82-year-old dad stayed with him for four weeks during lockdown, and Stephen says he discovered his dad was a bell-end. He put the heating up to high, and when Stephen watched real-life murder documentaries, which he got his dad into, and in these programmes they have actors re-enacting the crime, and then cut to real-life footage in court. His dad watched a show and said: "Oh, look, they've got the wrong man. He wasn't the man we saw earlier", mistaking the re-enactment for the real thing.

- The downside of being sucked in a salt mine is whirlpools. In Lake Peigneur, Louisiana, a shallow, freshwater lake that sits above a large underground salt mine. In 1980, an oil company is drilling in the lake and accidentally bored a hole straight into the mine. The lake water drained into the hole, making a 400-metre diameter whirlpool, sucking in the drilling platform, 11 barges, a tug boat, many trees, and 65 acres of the Rip Van Winkle Botanic Gardens, including all of their greenhouses. Luckily, there were no fatalities, and even the 55 miners working underground survived. The flow of the canal, which normally drained the lake into the Gulf of Mexico, reversed. It instead sucked in sea water into the lake and fed the whirlpool, which ended up becoming a 50m deep waterfall. The water then erupted upwards through the mine shafts in the form of 400ft geysers.

- Tangent: The two largetest natural whirlpools include the Saltstraumen and the Moskstraumen, both in Norway. The third-largest is in Corryvreckan in the Hebrides. In 2000, a TV documentary crew threw a mannequin with a depth gauge attached to it, and it came to the surface some distance away, having been dragged along the bottom at a depth of 860ft.

- George Orwell nearly died in Corryvreckhan, as he was living nearby, writing 1984, and decided to take his three-year-old son along with some nieces and nephews out on a boating trip past the whirlpool. The boat got sucked in, capsized, and Orwell just about managed to swim to a small island, where Orwell tied his shirt to a fishing rod and waved it about until they were rescued.[/colour

General Ignorance

[colour=#000080]- The number of seasons varies around the world, depending on where you live and who colonised you. Britain used to have just summer and winter, with spring and autumn not having established named until about the 16th century. South Vietnam has three seasons: hot and dry, rainy, cool and dry. South-west USA have four seasons for historical reasons because of colonists. The traditional Hindu calendar has six seasons. (Forfeit: Four)

- The most popular Volkswagen is Originalteil currywurst sausages. They were originally produced to feed the staff, but became so popular they are no sold for €10 a pack, and are given as gifts in VW dealerships in 11 countries, but not in the UK. The VW base in Wolfsburg has 30 butchers on the payroll. (Forfeit: Polo; Beetle; Golf; Passat; Scirocco)

- Tangent: Non-league football club Bedale AFC is sponsored by Heck Sauages, and as a result, since 2017, their strips have been covered with gaudy pictures of sausages and meals featuring sausages. The press dubbed it: "the wurst football kit ever", and the story got reported in Turkey and Canada. As a gift, Sandi gives Alan their 2019 strip, featuring bangers and mash. In 2017, the strip was just sausages, in 2018 it was a hot dog, in 2020 they had a vegetarian version with a carrot, and they are planning a "toad in the goal" version.

- You should handle rare, old books with clean bare hands. The National Trust, the Smithsonian, the British Library and other institutions do not approve of white gloves because you lack the dexterity and tactileness of fingers, making it more likely you will tear pages. The gloves are also slippery, so you might drop the book. There are also tiny fragments of pigment that are more likely to stick to the material of the glove than if you have just bare skin. Gloves also retain dirt. (Forfeit: White gloves)

- XL Tangent: Japanese police officers tend to wear gloves. According to an interview with an officer in 2010, this dates back to security at Beatles concerts in 1966, and the rule was introduced because they had to manoeuvre lots of screaming young women, and it was thought inappropriate to move them with bare hands.

- Ignorance of the law can count as a defence. Many legal systems, including the UK's, have recognised exceptions which erode the principle that ignorance is not an excuse. German, French and Austrian courts have criminal codes explicitly recognising a defence of a reasonable mistake of the law. In South Africa, as long as the accused is genuinely ignorant of the law, that is a defence.

- [colour=#000080]XL Tangent: In the UK there are strict liability laws where it does not matter whether you knew or not, then you are guilty, which include speeding. (Forfeit: No excuse)

[i]- [colour=#000080]XL Tangent: In 2020, a woman got a parking ticket because she was giving CPR to a dying man in a car park. She overstayed by 12 minutes and got fined £100.

Scores

- Holly Walsh: -5 points
- Alan Davies: -6 points
- Ivo Graham: -13 points
- Stephen K. Amos: -27 points